The Way Food Used to Look

This is going to amaze you. The vegetables and fruits we know today are vastly different from what they began as.

OK, three guesses, what is this?

A. Squash
B. Banana
C. Some kind of starchy vegetable

If you guessed B. banana,  you were right! There were two types of this banana with hard seeds in Southeast Asia, about 7000 years ago. Someone made a hybrid, and our delicious, soft, sweet banana is what eventually came of it.

What about this tasty-looking item? Those are early carrots.  Carrots started their life in and around Afghanistan. The early ones were purple or white, and they didn’t become orange until at least the 15th century.

Here’s wild corn, before it was domesticated.  European settlers started the domestication process in the 1400s.

Eggplant, anyone?? Wild eggplant had a lot more seeds than our modern variety.  It wouldn’t make a very good eggplant parmigiana.

Here are some other foods you may not recognize. These are what certain foods look like when grown, before they reach the market. This is the way they look today, not in yesteryear.

Cashews grow from the bottom of these “cashew apples”, which are not edible but can be made into a stringent juice.

Cocoa pods eventually turn into your favorite chocolate bar, but cocoa starts out looking like this.

The bark of this tree turns into everyone’s favorite spice, cinnamon!

And finally… the chickpea! These are green when raw, and perfectly edible. A little prettier than those you get in a can, wouldn’t you say?

Melody, MagicKitchen.com blogger